


at least their feathers are shiny

by orphan_account



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Worldbuilding, coping with not very funny black humor, the sky fishers/crow people and the vuvalini don't get along well anymore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-26
Updated: 2015-08-26
Packaged: 2018-04-17 07:12:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4657380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They were young, but by then the world has basically finished going to shit around them, so.</p>
            </blockquote>





	at least their feathers are shiny

They sometimes joke about how the things the Keeper refers to as dating pools have disappeared together with the rest of the water. With Spike captured and Stream poisoned by some vermin that turned out not to be good for consumption, they are one man removed from being each other’s only viable options, and that guy is kind of a cousin, too. Or course, for this result we have to exclude hopefuls from rival gangs, but going out to find someone who won’t betray you is foolishly suicidal and needs the kind of guzzoline they no longer have. They face the fact of being young at a time when the world itself is in its last days. The Keeper tries the soils in her skulls, and the skyfishing nets are still repaired, but that’s about as much as they concede to the idea of a future. 

Sprig is old enough to see the irony of his name, it slowly turning to be one of the last surviving green things around. He has seen the relationship between the two halves of their tribe deteriorate. It was a pragmatical decision for the less desirable-for-kidnappers men to stay home and use the dwindling resources, while the mobile initiates of the Vuvalini to combine their self-defense fleeing with some useful banditry (as if they could have survived long out there without killing people, anyway). But the constant pressure they live under makes those physically removed to feel less and less close to their hearts, and the murmured gossip grows sour like the water they must do more and more elaborate things to before drinking. He is too young to influence politics, and when he is not, the suspicions have made their nests too well to get rid of, and the full-clan visits grow rare. He keeps drying meat to pack for the Valkyre when she comes by, but there is no structured mutual help between the two groups anymore – the bikers need every last bullet, and it isn’t like the swamp could be made observably more defendable with a bit of ammunition in their rusting guns, so they resort to looking miserable and keeping the bog inaccessible as their main strategies (and maintaining their poison darts, for at least there are still snakes in the mud). The smoked crow they could offer in exchange is not much better than the things the women could find in the desert, anyway. 

He grew up with the Valkyrie, and his one good memory of Furiosa is yelling her pre-initiation name while running from Val between the bush tomatoes, following rules he can't really reconstruct anymore. The plants dried up a few years after her kidnapping.

It’s not actually funny that they happen to find each other attractive, and they are honestly thankful for it, but still keep joking about the great choice the other made, and of the miraculous way their paths crossed on the lucky day they have met. Dignity can be fed with interesting odds and ends. At least they do know each other enough to make an informed decision. The Valkyre trusts him completely, knows how to accept his help when she’s wounded and how to cheer him up when the walls inside his head that protect him from the tragedy of their situation grow thin. Touch is giving them both comfort, and while the idea of forcing this world onto an innocent infant is obviously excluded, they know the ways they can create joy from their bodies without risking that. There are times when she just wants to hide in the crook of his neck. She brings him a snail shell, a bit of metal good to be sharpened into a knife and precious alcohol salvaged from the car of someone who fell in their trap, and he sews crow feathers to her jacket’s shoulder. There is something about looking like the birds that started out destroying their crops and signaling the decline of the Green Place that is less than romantic, but it goes well with the cynical bent of their inside jokes. She is his killer bird that always returns to him after feasting on the dead, and she drags the points of her birdskull knuckles across his chest under the stars as if it was the first step towards devouring him too.

Of all things, she loses him to a banal infection they can no longer grow the weeds to cure. In his lucid moments, he jokes about the bright future he misses out on, and in the general background of pain, she is thankful that she got to kiss him goodbye and have her tears smudged by his fingers. And that the old man on guard duty only came with the news of light on the horizon and the need to run away in the hour after he died.

**Author's Note:**

> please don't take this as a militant position in the sometimes heated arguments around the Vuvalini's morality with regard to the crow guys ("abandoned male children" is the expression the semi-insider guy starting the argument has used). Also, my english is wonky, but the bush tomato is actually not an error, but an australian plant.


End file.
